


It Causes All the Grief

by snarks



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Insomnia, M/M, Mentions of Frontotemperal Demensia, Nightmares, Pre Season 3B, Stiles centric, Stiles' Darkness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-22
Updated: 2014-06-22
Packaged: 2018-02-05 16:23:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,849
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1824766
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snarks/pseuds/snarks
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He wants to go home. To curl up and surrender to sleep – because he realizes now that it’s been a war, this whole time, and that he’s losing – and let the world move on without him. He can feel his mother’s madness just behind his eyes now, clear – he’s sure – to be seen if anyone just looks hard enough. He tries not to think about it, tries to hide from that terrible truth for just a little longer.</p><p>In the black around him the tricksters laugh and crowd in closer, circling the dying thing in their midst, their loud cries of cruel joy the only sound in the night, their flashing eyes of silver and gold the only solid thing he can see. In the distance as storm builds, the dark clouds unseen against the night sky, and he watches, numbly, as a single bolt of lightning crashes down to the earth in a violent collision. The world is cast in pretty, familiar blue and his heart aches.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It Causes All the Grief

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not entirely certain what this is, but it's finished and I like it, so here it is.
> 
> Pre-3B Stiles-Centric one-shot knocked out one night because I couldn't sleep. It's meant to be slightly odd, since it's from the perspective of a sleep deprived Stiles, but if it makes absolutely no sense at all I apologize and will try and work on it if you let me know :) Title taken from Florence + The Machine's song "Falling"
> 
> No Beta, all problems and issues are my own.
> 
> Kudos, comments and concrit is always welcomed and loved.

There are times he can’t sleep.

Times when he lays heavy and aching in his bed, staring out into the darkness of his room incapable of losing himself to his exhaustion. Sleep has become more a fleeting memory than an certainty no matter how tired he is, no matter how much he wants to escape the thoughts of his waking mind. He tosses and turns in his bed, the room too hot, too cold, too empty and quiet and too full of things he can’t bring himself to face or remember. The clock on his nightstand counts down, minutes slipping away like the sand of some terrible hourglass, tallying in the such a small, terrible way how little time he has left until -

(Until what? Until _what?_ He doesn’t know, but he feels it, feels the weight of it more and more every day, pressing down, heavy on his chest. His lungs struggle to take air, his heart aches with the effort just to keep beating. Time is running out, he knows, he _knows_ , he just doesn’t know what it _means_. What the minutes fading too quickly to stop or stall are leading him to. It’s just the vastness of everything, of the unknown thing _lurking_ just beyond his awareness. _Until, until, Until..._ )

They are worse nights, nights when he _can_ sleep but his dreams are so warped and twisted and awful that he wakes only to the relief of more nightmares. And endless cycle of horrors that threaten to swallow him whole if he lets go. But those nights are rare still – he can’t allow himself to think that there will be a time where they _aren’t_ rare, though the thought lurks heavy and dark in his head, because there is already the itch of madness behind his eyes and admitting that it all can be _worse_ will only draw it to the surface – and he can ignore them as long as they stay that way. The nightmares are something he ignores, forces himself to willfully forget so as not to lose himself completely to the subtle, waiting thing that acknowledging them will welcome in.

He tosses and turns instead. His eyes burn needing rest, his limbs feel heavy and clumsy when he tries to move them. His mind though, his mind never settles. Always awash with thought and memory and guilt and so much more. Questions, always flickering into and out of existence, insistent and impossible to ignore, always pushing for him to _answer_. Years of doctors and trials on medications that use to make him slow and stupid or fast and numb all telling him with confidence that his wrongness is common and ordinary, fixable if only the right dosage of the right chemicals could be found. The Adderall helps, some, but he doesn’t think in the way it does others. His mind still moves too fast, still zooms along too quickly for him to settle down and _focus_ , the Adderall only helps in forcing his body to move at the same speed.

The insomnia is new though. Or the heavy, paradox of it in any case. He _wants_ to sleep, he _wants_ to drift and fade and lose himself to the oblivion of his sleeping mind, he simply _can’t_.

He gives in eventually. Abandons his pretense at resting altogether and leaves his bed behind in search of worthier distractions. There’s no use of laying still and quiet – of _trying_ to lay still and quiet – if his body is incapable of submitting to sleep. The pantomime of settling down at night, of bedclothes and fresh sheets and the pillow that he still swears smells of his mother’s perfume - even though he knows, logically, bitterly, that any traces of the scent faded long ago - grows more and more stale each night he fails to slip away into the empty unknown. There are times when he sits at his desk chair, staring – _scowling_ – at his carefully made up bed, as if the bedframe and mattress are to blame for his mind’s failing. There are more times, though, where he doesn’t.

The nights his father is home he stays.

Those nights he tucks a blanket or a towel against the seam between bedroom door and floor to hide the light of the lamp he’s flicked on. His father worries, has always worried but he worries _more_ now that he knows. Now that things like _werewolves_ and _kanimas_ and **_monsters_** of a kind far scarier than bank robbers and drug dealers are real. He doesn’t want him to worry about this, wants to keep him free of at least the worry of his son’s long nights counting down moments that can’t be reclaimed. So he hides, as he has always hidden, and puts his too active mind to work.

He pins news articles and grainy black and white pictures to his walls, messy scrawl pressed tightly into the empty spaces and margins to mark down ideas that only make sense in his head. He maps connections with string, thinks of ancient crones curled over the lives of men and women long gone and yet to be born, measuring out lifetimes, cutting them short, moving on to the next name on the list. He chooses the colors of his own attempts carefully, but it comes to naught in the end. Red is the color he sees everywhere he turns. Bright and horrible, like the blood spilled by nightmares and secrets he’s likely never going to be able to name, staining the walls and leaking from one horrible death to the next. The other colors remain carefully wound and unused; laying useless in a drawer he never bothers to open.

One color was never meant for his wall, was never meant to be measured out and snipped into careful lengths. It’s a shame, he thinks - whenever he steps back from his macabre thoughts and the lines and lines of red - that the blue is likely never to be seen. He wouldn’t have bought the skein at all, but the store had been having a sale and the color had been so temptingly _pretty_ and achingly familiar that he couldn’t help himself.

(He doesn’t think about that though. Can’t. Can’t, can’t, _can’t_. He refuses in that instinctive, primal way rabbits still themselves in the presence of a predator, in that way small children avoid the flickering dance of a flame after curious fingers have been burned. Can’t allow himself to think about how and why seeing the color settles his manic thoughts, settles the aching sense of _time running out_ that constantly thrums through his chest. There’s too much there to think about, to admit to. Far too much for a single night trapped in his room, sleepless and surrounded by death and blood and minutes passing too fast to count.

It’s better the nights his father _isn’t_ there. When the Sheriff is gone, shuffling off early in the morning to work extra shifts to make up for the lives lost. When he sneaks the greasy, terrible food he doesn’t know his deputies report to Stiles loyally, when the Sheriff can slip back into habits their little family of two formed long ago in the wake of a death neither of them were capable of surviving properly. Another pretense, but one Stiles can’t bring himself to call attention to. Not after all the lies and secrets, not after nearly losing his father to things just as terrible as what he lost his mother too.

The nights his father is gone he leaves.

Not forever, not even for very long. But he does leave. Waits until he gets the last goodnight call from his father, until he knows there won’t be any more checkups, and then leaves. He slips on his shoes and grabs his keys and is _gone_ , if only for a little while.

He never thinks about where it is he’s going. Never climbs into the worn familiarity of his jeep with anything like a destination in mind. Instead he stares out through the glass of the windshield – a small crack still spider-webbing the one corner, yet to be fixed after his last crash - as his hands curled carefully, desperately, around the wheel and shifter while he lets the night surround him. Sometimes he stops at places as familiar as they are painful. The hospital his mother withered away in. A section of the preserve Finstock has the cross country team run, where he once led Scott through in search of a dead body. The warehouse someone wealthy and enterprising had converted into loft apartments. Familiar places. Places where things begin and end.

It’s almost like sleepwalking, he thinks. Like those nights when he was young and his mother didn’t look at him like he was a stranger, when he would come out of a dream to find himself down in the kitchen or curled up in the linen closet. It’s not, really, but it almost is. Sometimes he will look up and it will feel like he’s stepping out of the impossibility of dreams and back into reality. As if all the chaos and pain and suffering of the past year somehow had been a figment of his tired mind.

Most nights, though, he leaves Beacon Hills completely.

Steers his old jeep down little used roads and forgotten lanes until the lights of the town fade and the buildings disappear. He knows where his father’s deputies sit on patrol, waiting in grueling boredom in the dark for drunks and speeders to pass by. It’s easy to avoid them, even without a destination or conscious attempt to drive, and it never takes long to lose himself to the endless stretch of a dark roads fading into the night.

He shifts up through the gears until there is nothing left, until his foot traps the accelerator as far down as it will go and the headlights flash over the world around him too fast to properly see. The wind is a loud wail, like a woman screaming, and the engine is thundering roar he hasn’t heard in a long time. The wheels spin at a dangerous speed beneath him, making the jeep unsteady, carrying him further and further away from the fears he can’t name.

There are moments, short and insubstantial, where he thinks his eyes register the flicker of movement or the telling flash of animal eyes at the very edge of his awareness. He never sees what creates them, moves too fast for their shapes to be distinguished from the black around him, but he thinks _foxes_ and _coyotes_ and doesn’t question why. Only feels – in that same, nameless way that he seems to feel _everything_ anymore – that they are waiting for him, waiting for him to slow down, to stop running long enough that they can catch him. Dig into him with sharp teeth and jagged claws and tear him to pieces.

He urges his jeep faster, hands _aching_ he clings to the steering wheel so hard. There’s another flash of watching eyes – _hungry, so very hungry, **insatiable**_ – and the faint, non-existent cackle of a lone canine waiting for its prey to tire out. His jeep lurches, sudden and unexpected, and the needle on the speedometer climbs even higher as he moves, impossibly, _faster_. He’s not going to be caught that night.

He feels the rush of it, the sense of ancient, primal instincts stretching out as they are awoken from a long sleep. The eyes are gone, the shapes fading completely, and he throws his head back hard against the head rest and _screams_. It sounds almost like a howl, his heart beating faster in his chest at the hope – desperate and pathetic – that there will be a reassuring response. That his voice will fade beneath the noise of his wheezing vehicle and another, stronger voice will lift into the night air, warn away the lesser predators that chase him away completely. That his call for pack will be answered.

(It isn’t.)

One night he drives all the way to a canyon, so far from Beacon Hills he won’t slip back into his room until after the sun has risen and burned away the early morning fog. The nightmares are worse, attack more often. Sleep gets easier, but he doesn’t want it like he used to. The rasping scape of insanity, the one that has been passed down to him from his mother, is more insistent now, clawing its way to the surface. It takes so much more to escape the dark shapes that chase him in the night than it used to.

The canyon is shallow, but it’s steep enough to be dangerous. He stops the jeep and gets out, the ping of the cooling engine more like a death rattle than a tired pant, pats the too-hot hood gently in thanks for its efforts to help him escape. He hasn’t seen another car in hours and the night is heavy and secretive around him. In the distance he can hear the sounds of hungry things stalking easy prey, feels the itch of distance eyes on his back.

He walks away from the road and his jeep, traveling numbly for a long time until he’s standing at the dividing edge between solid earth and empty air. It feels important somehow, poignant. He doesn’t think to jump, though something in his head suggests that a stranger might make that mistake of thinking he will. He does, though, think of what it might be like to fall.

He can’t make out the bottom in the blackness of the night, can barely make out the ledge he stands upon. The place gravity would tug and yank his body down to is a mystery, but he can hear the distant rush of water. Faraway and threating, promising to swallow up his broken body and carry it away if he should fall down the hellish rabbit hole he stood at. He thinks it would be cold, like the water he died in a few weeks ago. Biting and cruel, sucking away any breath that he might still have in him after the long tumble down. When the wind blows up from the moving, serpentine bottom of the canyon he thinks he can smell the harsh mix of sterile vet clinic and deadly mistletoe on the breeze.

He leaves the canyon. Turns on his heel and climbs back into his jeep and forces the old thing back to life once more. The engine coughs and groans but doesn’t fail his unwavering belief that it will get him home as he turns back onto the road and starts racing back to Beacon Hills. It doesn’t matter how fast he drives, the shapes of tricksters flank him on each side and stay with him the whole way. He thinks of screaming again, of his almost howl, of the person he wants to response to his agonized call, but doesn’t. He’s too tired to run any more. He’s too tired to even try.

He wants to go home. To curl up and surrender to sleep – because he realizes now that it’s been a war, this whole time, and that he’s losing – and let the world move on without him. He can feel his mother’s madness just behind his eyes now, clear – he’s sure – to be seen if anyone just looks hard enough. He tries not to think about it, tries to hide from that terrible truth for just a little longer.

In the black around him the tricksters laugh and crowd in closer, circling the dying thing in their midst, their loud cries of cruel joy the only sound in the night, their flashing eyes of silver and gold the only solid thing he can see. In the distance as storm builds, the dark clouds unseen against the night sky, and he watches, numbly, as a single bolt of lightning crashes down to the earth in a violent collision. The world is cast in pretty, familiar blue and his heart _aches._

The next time he sleeps he dreams of the same terrible things he always dreams of and wakes to Lydia in his bed. It’s comfortable and familiar and everything he once fantasized it might be. It’s dark and the world around them is blue

(Blue like the string he will never use, like the cast of the world when lightning strikes, like eyes that hold so much guilt)

and he knows, very suddenly, that it isn’t real. His bedroom door is open and Lydia is still begging him, pleading with him, but his hand is already around the knob and somewhere, somewhere far away, he can hear the chatter of a fox laughing over its good fortune. He wants to close the door, but opens it instead, instinct and something older still pushing him along. He thinks of the night at the canyon, of that precarious place between earth and air. He doesn’t jump, doesn’t even think about it, but instead sees the empty void on the other side of the doorway and lets himself _fall._


End file.
